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PyconUK 2012

PyconUK is a community organised conference focussed on the
Python programming language for UK based
developers and other interested parties. This year I was both an attendee and
organiser and this post is a review of my personal highlights.

Actually, I'd like to start by explaining the work that's required to
organise a conference such as PyconUK. First, PyconUK has a great reputation:
it is great value for money (£100 a ticket if you booked as an early bird),
packed full of excellent talks and has a very friendly atmosphere. This is
due to the "tone" set by the originators of the conference back when it
first started five or six years ago. Happily many of the original team are
still involved and it has been an education watching what and how they
organise things.

Since this is a community organised conference all organisers are
volunteers. Most of our interaction was via weekly IRC meetings, although
sometimes we'd find a pub in a vaguely central location (we're
all based in the Midlands) and conduct business
over a friendly pint. In either case, meetings were business like, tended to
be waffle free and always ended in clearly defined and delegated tasks.
There's no room for fanny-annying around when organising PyconUK!

It is a sad fact that having a diversity statement and/or code of conduct
for a free software conference is becoming the norm. One would hope that
attendees at free software conferences (whose communities value openness, merit
and collaboration) would understand that sexism, racism and all
other forms of prejudicial behaviours are completely unacceptable. Unfortunately,
recent and very public cases at other free software related conferences have
shown that some people are clueless idiots. It is through their moronic
actions that our communities are brought into disrepute
(happily, to my knowledge, PyconUK has never had to deal with such
misdemeanours). We acknowledged the need for such a statement: it would
clearly state the expectations of the wider Python community within the UK and
give us, the organisers, a set of options for dealing with potential idiots.
However, we strongly felt that we didn't want to follow the example of
some other conferences with a list of condescending rules that curtailed
freedom of expression in all its glorious manifestations. These are complex
issues that a mere set of rules would simply aggravate. I contacted a couple
of other "Pycons" (our Italian friends at
Europython and antipodean cousins at
PyconAu) for advice and drafted something
that attempted to walk the fine line between expectation and curtailment. After
feedback from both the other PyconUK organisers and the wider Python community
in the UK, it was adopted. In case you're interested, it's released under a
creative
commons license and is
available here. Feedback is
always most welcome.

I never imagined I'd be writing, arranging and recording a conference song,
but, thanks to fellow organiser, design guru and "bloke in charge of publicity"
Steve Hawkes, it was decided that one
was needed. Given that I have a musical background I was drafted in to help.
Steve's idea was to do a version of the
elements song
but for all the Python language's keywords. This is a classic "patter" song
and is itself based upon the famous
Major General's Song
from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera
The Pirates of
Penzance. It also fitted quite nicely with the "Victorian" snakes vibe that
Steve was using in his designs - Gilbert and Sullivan are very much a Victorian
phenomenon. A couple of Skype calls and various emails later we had the words
sorted out. We attempted to engage the services of a "proper singer" but in the
end it fell to me to sing the damn thing (and many thanks to my mate,
Darren Goldsmith, who acted
as sound engineer and producer). You can find the results
at this GitHub
repository. Please feel free to suggest new lines and verses via pull
requests! At some point in the not-too-distant future we hope to record a group
of Pythonistas singing the chorus (watch out London Python Code Dojo). We were
hoping to do this at the conference itself but lack of time and the fact that I
lost my voice meant we were unable to fulfil this desire.

In any case, Steve caught the G&S vibe and produced some quite brilliant
t-shirts and personalised mugs quoting lines from the song (see the example on
the right). I really can't wait
to see what he comes up with for next year's conference. I suspect finding a
strong UK based theme is an essential element. We did "The Blitz" last year,
Victorians this year and I'm starting to worry we're turning into something
akin to a Blackadder version of British history given the choices we've been
making. ;-)

How about a bonnets and blouses Jane Austen theme or perhaps something
Elizabethan? Maybe we could go more modern and adopt the swinging sixties as
a touchstone (Austin Powers..?) or Punk?

It remains to be seen what Steve's thoughts on the matter are...

Given the interest in RaspberryPi
(apparently so called because it runs a programming language called "Python"
- just fancy that?) and the teaching of programming in schools (see my blog
posts here
and here)
it was suggested that "education" would be a good theme. As I used to
be a teacher I stepped up to bring my colleagues past and present together in
an "education" track.

We, the Python community, have been presented with an opportunity: the
resurgence of interest in the teaching of programming to children
has caused a lot of people to look to Python. Many teachers of ICT (that'd be
Information and Communication Technology) don't have any programming experience
and the thought of teaching such a weird, abstract and potentially
complex activity to a room of thirty kids of mixed ability is likely to fill
them with horror. The question of what should be taught is also moot (hence the
interest in Python). I personally think the promotion and practice of
"computational thinking" facilitated via a language such as Python (but done in
as language neutral way as possible) is the way to go. Obviously (and I'm being
very cynical here), incumbent interests in educational ICT and companies within
the IT industry will be interested in promoting their platform as the mechanism
to "teach the kids to code" (whatever that may mean).

At PyconUK we simply wanted to find out how best to meet the needs of
teachers and show them what it's like to be a part of a free software community
with all that entails: collaboration, debate, openness, meritocracy, sharing of
resources and learning from the examples of others.

So our aim was simple: if you bring two diverse groups of intelligent and
motivated people together interesting things are bound to happen. It turns out
we were correct! I'm especially grateful to
Alan O'Donohoe for helping me
get the word out (most of the teachers I know are music, rather than ICT,
teachers) and Alan has quite a cult status among those "in the know" about all
things ICT. This culminated in a Google hangout where I was given
the opportunity to promote our event to anyone who happened to drop by:

It turns out that quite a number of teachers were interested but getting
them to come along was quite hard - the current squeeze on school budgets
and indifference of management being the two primary causes. Nevertheless, we
almost had a whole cohort of 30 trainee ICT teachers turn up but, alas, funding
nipped that in the bud.

In the end we had about ten teachers in total turn up over the weekend and
an abundance of developers who wanted to dive in and help.
On the Saturday morning was an
"Introducing Python" workshop that
John Pinner and I ran and there
were also a handful of talks on several education related projects over the
duration of the conference (for example, Mike Sandford's
talk about the
turtle module).

Sunday morning was perhaps the highlight of the weekend for me as both
teachers and developers rolled up their collective sleeves and took part in an
"education sprint" (a sprint, in the context of a free software conference, is
an intense period of work and collaboration on a specific and clearly defined
project). Here's a group shot of the participants:

We were very lucky to have
Carrie Anne Philbin (well
known for her infectious enthusiasm and excellent blog,
ICT with Miss P) who stepped up
to run a post-it note led session for discovering attendee's interests. It was
a case of worlds colliding. I don't think any of the
developers were aware of the conditions that teachers have to deal with: troll
like network administrators with no interest in helping to promote learning,
locked down laptops that are unusable unless you want to use Word, out-of-date
versions of software that put teachers in the technological stone-age (Internet
Explorer 6!) and all this in
addition to the burden of teaching, marking, planning, social work, behaviour
management, OFSTED inspections and extra-curricular clubs, groups and
activities that form the day to day activities of a teacher.

Once the developers had picked their collective jaws up from the floor,
we agreed to split in to mixed groups of teachers and
developers with a view to quickly drafting outlines of schemes of work, lesson
plans and other educational resources (I spent an enjoyable hour creating a
draft for a scheme of work about text based adventure games). At the end we
came together for a show-and-tell feedback session. The results of the
morning can be found
in this
github repository.

A welcome addition to our ranks was PSF chairperson
Van Lindberg who made significant
contributions to the discussion about adventure games as a vehicle for
learning. Great stuff! In addition, during the Saturday evening PSF member's
meeting Carrie Anne somehow smuggled herself in resulting in much of the ensuing
conversation to be centred around how the PSF could help teachers use
Python (nice one Miss P!). Happily, it looks like an education portal will
become part of the scope for the redesign of the
python.org website and hopefully
Carrie-Anne, Alan and teaching colleagues around the world will have a chance
to shape its development.

Actually, there is an education summit at
Pycon in California in March and it would be wonderful if both Carrie-Anne and
Alan could be the recipients of grants so they can attend. One thing that
frustrates me about the world of education is the lack of global coordination:
teachers all over the world duplicate, rather than share, each other's efforts.
No matter the local education system, surely an international
community such as Python can bring teachers together to promote the creative
fun that is programming? If we don't, there's a danger that there won't be a
Pycon left in twenty five year's time. After all, when you have teachers as
enthusiastic as Carrie Anne (see her video response to PyconUK below) and Alan
we'd be fools not to support them in their efforts to help the next generation
of hackers discover their programming chops.

Finally, there was the rest of the conference: the lightning talks
(video
here) were as funny as ever with
Dan Pope's talk on his gaming
creations bringing the house down (at around the 31 minute mark). I had a lot
of fun parping on my Tuba with
Ben Croston (who has the excellent
job of brewing beer in a brewery that's automated by Python). You can hear us
at around the 1h:17m mark.
It was great to catch up with so many old friends in the pub or at the
impromptu curry outing (I'm sure I overheard, "can we have a table for 22
please?") and, of course, there were the talks. I think my favourite slide of
the conference is this one from Antonio
Cuni who seems to be channelling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in this
graph explaining the phases of a tracing JIT compiler:

I'm already looking forward to next year (just you wait to see what we have
planned).